possession he was compelled to reinstate the
nobles in all their privileges, under a _Pacta Conventa_, which,
subject to alterations made at Diets, was retained as part of the
Coronation Oath so long as there were Polish kings to be consecrated.
He was the last sovereign of the Piast period. After compelling
his daughter to marry, not William of Austria, whom she loved, but
Jagellon, Duke of Lithuania, who offered to unite his extensive
and adjacent dominions with those of Poland, and to convert his
own pagan subjects to Christianity, the nobles, in virtue of their
Magna Charta, elected Jagellon (baptized under the name of Ladislas)
to the throne of Poland, which thus became dynastically united
(1386), with that of Lithuania.

On the death, in 1572, of Sigismund II., Augustus, the last of
the Jagellons, the power of the king, already limited by that of
two chambers, was still further diminished, and the crown became
elective. While occupied in besieging the Huguenots at Rochelle,
and at a time when Poland enjoyed more religious liberty than any
other country in Europe, Henry of Valois was elected to the throne,
in succession to Sigismund II.; but he quickly absconded from Cracow
in order to become Henry III. of France. The Jesuits, introduced in
the next reign, that of Stephen Bathori, brought strong intolerance
with them, and one of the reasons that led the Cossacks of the Polish
Ukraine to solicit Russian protection was the inferior position to
which their Greek religion had been reduced in relation to Roman
Catholicism. The Russians and Poles had been at war with each other
for two centuries. Moscow had been occupied in 1610 by the Poles in
the name of Ladislas, son of Sigismund III., of the Swedish Wasa
family, elected to the Muscovite throne by the Russian boyars, but
soon expelled by the patriots, under Minin and Pojarski. Sobieski,
who had saved Vienna for the Austrians, could not keep Kief and
Little Russia for the Poles. Such was the outcome of disorders and
revolutions in the State, and of wars with Muscovy, Turkey, and
Sweden, as well as with Tartars and Cossacks. Frederick Augustus
II., Elector of Saxony, succeeded Sobieski, and reigned until 1733,
with an interval of five years, during which he was superseded by
Stanislas I.

[Illustration: NOWO ZJAZD STREET, WARSAW.]

Dissension and anarchy became still more general, in the reign of
the next sovereign, Augustus III. Civil war, in which the question
o